Meta

Month / January 2010

Life has a balance of its own and it will find you if you sit still long enough. This morning, I wake from a pivotal moment in a dream [a child nudged off a wall by another child], to the sound of a message vibrating on my cell. It is still dark outside though late in the morning and I can not yet tell it is raining in the desert for the third day in a row. What a blessing!

With the part of my brain that was not watching the dream, I am practicing thanksgiving, calling to my own remembrance – as the gospel song has it – all the places He has brought me through. I go further back in time with a newfound perspective on supernatural provision forged last night in bible study. Usually, my mind finds something to be grateful for in the past five or so years because all of each day has seemed graced by His unchanging hand.

I borrow the Hebrew tradition of dayanu, appreciating again, as if for the very first time, that it would indeed have been enough had the Lord only seen fit to give the church friend who gave me a two-bedroom condo full of furniture, free of charge, a generous heart. But the blessing neither began nor ended there, dayanu! He also provided friends with trucks to move it, the funds to feed them dinner and every item to my taste and the color scheme of my dwelling.

From there my mind took me back to the gift of $1000 dollars that completed the goal that enabled me to participate in a three-week class field trip to The Middle East in the early 80s. The donor was also a woman from the church in which I then taught Sunday School. Remembering her generosity, the sparkle of her emerald eyes, I paid it forward decades later, in what would have been considered a desperately dry time while living in Providence. My gift enabled Cuban teens to participate in a Quaker conference that summer. Dayenu.

Flashing still further back, noting what now felt like the supernatural cast to every event in my life, all the way back to my mother’s courageous expedition, sans bebes, to the United States when I had attained the ripe old age of 18 months, I gave thanks like never before for the gifts of provision both seen and unseen from that year. Dayenu, daYEnu!

So if, as Pastor House says and I believe, God is up to something, no matter how harrowing or happifying the conditions, we’ve got more than enough reasons to say, Thank YOU. Dayenu.

Leaving the Trader Joe’s parking lot this evening I fell in behind a van with Doula as the license plate. We both needed to make a left turn but I needed certification information more so I pulled to the right, wound down my window, and began signalling for their attention with my left hand. A young man sat behind the wheel and a younger woman sat in the passenger seat. The sexist-ageist in me won out and neither of you looks like a doula was the first thing out of my mouth. The driver said his wife was the doula and gave me her number. I saved it in my cell phone just before the light turned. Before entering the dollar store I decided to give her a call. She invited me to come hang out with them tomorrow. If I get to the gym early enough, I just might do that. A doula with a doctorate running a community center / juice bar for the living arts could happen. I mean not much could be stranger than God in a manger, right?